Demographics – Page 4 – The Wrongologist

Monday Wake Up Call – February 20, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Oatman, AZ on Route 66 – February 2023 photo by Laurel Anne Lindsay

Some of you may have heard about a study called “The Hidden Tribes of America” by the group More in Common. It’s trying to understand the forces driving political polarization in America today. They classify the American electorate into seven distinct groups, they call “Tribes”.

But their key conclusion is that most people don’t belong on the far left or far right: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…the largest group that we uncovered in our research has so far been largely overlooked. It is a group of Americans we call the Exhausted Majority…representing a two-thirds majority of Americans, who aren’t part of the Wings….most members of the Exhausted Majority aren’t [simply] political centrists or moderates. On specific issues, their views range across the spectrum.”

“But while they hold a variety of views, the members of the Exhausted Majority are also united in important ways: They are fed up with the polarization plaguing American government and society….. [they] are so frustrated with the bitter polarization of our politics that many have checked out completely….. they aren’t ideologues who dismiss as evil or ignorant the people who don’t share their exact political views. They want to talk and to find a path forward.

This chart from the study graphically illustrates the seven tribal groups of the American populace. As you can see, there is a left-wing group that is about 8% of the US population. And there are two right-wing groups that equal about 25% of Americans. That leaves four groups in what the authors call the “Exhausted Majority”. They are 67% of the American populace.

Here are some demographic characteristics of the seven groups:

Progressive Activists: younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry.
Traditional Liberals: older, retired, open to compromise, rational, cautious.
Passive Liberals: unhappy, insecure, distrustful, disillusioned.
Politically Disengaged: young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic,
Moderates: engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant.
Traditional Conservatives: religious, middle class, patriotic, moralistic.
Devoted Conservatives: white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising,

Wrongo identifies as one of the Traditional Liberals, their description rings true.

The authors say that in their research, this tribal membership predicted differences in Americans’ views on various political issues better than demographic, ideological, and partisan groupings. You can read or download the whole study here.

An “Exhausted Majority” may be a positive political development. Wrongo spends nearly every day thinking that there are just two opposing camps. And that they each view each other with fear and loathing, refusing to listen to anything that doesn’t fit their existing narrative. As we’re entering the next presidential campaign, it’s good to know that Wrongo’s view of our polarization might be well, wrong.

Is the “Exhausted Majority” merely a new response to our dysfunctional politics? Wrongo isn’t alone in thinking that what’s wrong with our country will take decades to overcome. Faced with that, people start to look for quick fixes, or a way to stop listening to the wrangling. And you don’t have to be unaligned with either Party to share this sense of exasperation.

The people described in the “Exhausted Majority” are similar. It’s also true that for most people, politics isn’t the be-all-end-all of their lives. They’d prefer that the business of government didn’t require their involvement. They’re trying to get their kids educated, and to keep them safe. They prefer to see political compromise happen without needing to be involved.

But if you can walk away from politics when it frustrates you, then you’re in the lucky minority:

There are large numbers of parents who have discovered that their child is addicted to opioids.
There are many people who had lost their health insurance when they were laid off.
Many sent their daughter to college in the South only to learn that she no longer has any reproductive rights.
Many are worried that books are being taken from public school libraries.
Some fear that they may lose the right to vote.

These people can’t simply throw up their hands and walk away. Only political action will help them. We all know that the political radicals are irredeemable. We also know they make the most noise, but they’re a minority.

The fed-up people on both sides and in the middle have to find a way to take the country back from the radicals, instead of allowing ourselves to be herded into existing opposing camps.

Time to wake up America! We can’t simply drop out. There’s too much at stake. Democrats need to find candidates and a message that can motivate an additional 5%-15% of the “Exhausted Majority” to vote with them. To help you wake up, watch, and listen to the RedMolly band play a very nice cover of Richard Thompson’s “Vincent Black Lightning 1952”. It’s a surprise how beautifully it adapts to a bluegrass idiom, and the dobro work makes it:

“Vincent Black Lightning” is one of the most perfect songs ever written. We saw Thompson perform it live at Tanglewood last summer.

It’s Impossible To Buy A $200k Home Anymore

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Hood sunrise – February 2023 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

Happy Valentine’s Day for those who celebrate! If you don’t celebrate, find someone or something to give a little bit of love to.

In all of the hype about the Super Bowl and Rihanna’s halftime show, you may have missed that homes selling for less than $200k have basically disappeared in America.

John Burns, a real estate consultant, reports that they are now 0% of the new home market. They were 40% of the market 10 years ago. Burns also says that $500k+ new homes have grown from 17% of the market to 38% of the market during Covid. He provides this handy chart showing how average home prices have changed since 2010:

At the same time, sales of homes going for $500k or more (red line) have shot up from less than 10% to nearly 40% of the new homes market and represent the largest share of new home sales.

This isn’t great for Millennials looking to buy their first homes, or for retirees who have to downsize. It also explains why many first-time homebuyers are angry.

It’s not only the $200k and under segment that has fallen off a cliff. New homes going for between $200k – $300k now make up just 11% of the total, down from 80% of all new home sales in the year 2000.

Ben Carlson shows Federal Reserve new home price data going back to 2000 that breaks down new homes price points more clearly. He says that those being sold for $750k and up have gone from less than 1% to more than 10% of the market.

A few reasons for the shifts: First, we’re not building enough new houses anymore. Second, we’ve seen changing tastes drive demand toward larger homes, helping move the market to a new floor in home prices. Inflation didn’t help either.

We overbuilt in the 2000s housing bubble, and that led to more than a decade of underbuilding ever since. There was a brief spike during the pandemic housing craze but that has abated with mortgage rates rising so rapidly in the past year.

In 2002-2006, we were building around 120,000 new homes per year. In 2022, it was more like 65,000 units per year. Tastes have changed as well. Houses today are substantially larger than they were in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

In his book The Fifties, David Halberstam talks about how the housing market played a huge role in the rise of the suburbs following World War II. Then houses were about 1,300 square feet. In the 1970s, the median size of a new home in the US was 1,525 square feet. Today it’s around 2,500 square feet.

Tastes have changed. People want bigger houses. They want open floor plans for entertaining, bigger bedrooms with more bathrooms, and more storage space for all of their stuff.

It’s also true that homebuilders aren’t incentivized to build starter homes anymore. In the 1950s the government helped out the troops and their families. With the GI Bill, the federal government took some of the risk that homebuilders wouldn’t be able to find mortgages for all the new houses they were building.

Local zoning regulations have made it difficult to get approvals to build new homes. So builders have moved upmarket in home size to justify those upfront expenses. Starter homes aren’t as profitable as they once were.

There’s a big change in the buyer’s market as well. The WSJ quotes John Burns: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“You now have permanent capital competing with a young couple trying to buy a house.” Burns estimates that in many of the nation’s top markets, roughly one in every five houses sold is bought by someone who never moves in.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an article last week entitled: “American Dream For Rent: Investors elbow out individual home buyers. Metro Atlanta is ground zero for corporate purchases, locking families into renting’. The Journal says a generational housing shortage, inflated construction costs and a surge in consumer demand all contributed to the historic rise in prices.

But there’s little doubt that a flood of cash from institutional investors has exacerbated it. They quote Maura Neill, a realtor in Alpharetta:

“They go after every listing under $500,000…it’s like clockwork…The property gets listed and, sight unseen, they make offers within an hour.”

This is late-stage capitalism at work. Young working couples are increasingly shut out of buying homes. America is failing them. It would be helpful for families to build equity by purchasing homes instead of renting.

Pricing families out of home ownership carries risks to a cohesive society.

We should have a federal tax policy that disincentivizes ownership of multiple single-family homes, by investment funds. The way to remedy this is to steer investors to other assets that don’t directly impact individual welfare to the same degree as single family housing.

Biden’s Speech Showed His 2024 Strategy

The Daily Escape:

Sea smoke at Portland Head Light – February 2023 photo by Rick Berk Photography

(The Wrongologist is taking a few days off. The next column will appear on Tuesday, 2/14. Enjoy your nachos and jalapeno dip on Sunday.)

Wrongo and Ms. Right watched the State of the Union (SOTU) extravaganza. You have already read many insightful observations, so Wrongo’s facing the daunting task to come up with something original for you. Let’s start with some data. CNN’s flash poll of SOTU viewers found that 72% had a positive reaction to Biden’s speech, while:

“71% said Biden’s policies will move the country in right direction — up 19 percentage points from before his speech.”

That’s a win. Politico reported that:

“…the White House is ecstatic that the GOP’s ‘boos, taunts, groans, and sarcastic chortles’ helped Biden paint them as ‘unreasonable and chaotic.’”

It was the most confrontational SOTU address ever, but Biden seemed up to handling the catcalls. Like CNN, most pundits gave Biden good marks for the speech. It ran from “best Biden speech ever!” to “Biden Kills It” to Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo tweeting:

Everyone’s talking about how House Republicans underestimated old man Biden. His speech was an early look at his 2024 general election strategy. Biden is a career politician. Maybe he learned somewhere along his way to the Oval Office that you are only as unpopular as your enemies are popular. In that case, he’s a winner.

Based on Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ GOP rebuttal, Trumpists and their ilk plan to treat 2024 as another braying appeal to their grievance-filled base. They’re adding a rich creamy layer of culture war to help spin up their base, along with their evergreen awfulizing about the national deficit. From JV Last:

“Where Biden spent the majority of his speech talking about steel workers, bridge projects, insulin prices, and junk fees, Sanders insisted that Biden has surrendered to “a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is.” And that “his administration has been completely hijacked by the radical left.”

OTOH, Biden’s 2024 strategy won’t be a re-run. It’s different and new. As Eugene Robinson says in the WaPo:

“The call to action during President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday — “Let’s finish the job” — would never be mistaken for soaring poetry.”

That also resonated with Jon Last, who agrees that “Finish the Job” will be the campaign’s guiding theme. Here are the implied pillars of Biden 2024:

The economy has to keep growing and it must help everyone.
The deficit must be cut to the extent possible over the next six years.
Biden’s great accomplishments were achieved with bipartisan help of centrist Republicans.
The government needs to keep funneling money to small towns and rural areas, something that he started with the infrastructure bill.
The risky ideas of the MAGA Republicans who plan to torpedo Social Security and Medicare will be front and center in the campaign.

Instead of the Republicans’ embrace of the culture wars, here’s what Biden had to say: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“My economic plan is about investing in places and people that have been forgotten. Amid the economic upheaval of the past four decades too many people have been left behind or treated like they’re invisible.

Maybe that’s you watching at home.

You remember the jobs that went away. And you wonder whether a path even exists anymore for you and your children to get ahead without moving away. I get it.

That’s why we’re building an economy where no one is left behind. Jobs are coming back; pride is coming back because of the choices we made in the last two years.

This is a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America and make a real difference in your lives.”

A “Blue-Collar Blueprint” is a smart way to brand your 2024 agenda, instead of some focus-group tested acronym or clever name. Sometimes it just makes sense to say what you mean. As Ron Brownstein wrote in The Atlantic: (brackets by Wrongo)

“He [Biden] repeatedly noted how many of the jobs created by his economic agenda are not expected to require a four-year college degree.”

Jon Last contrasts Biden’s strategy with the GOP strategy, which he thinks is doomed to failure:

“Republicans believe they can increase the number of votes from one group of Americans (their base) by….attacking another group (the coastal elites). Further, Republicans believe that the number of votes they will win through this use of negative polarization will be greater than the number of votes they might otherwise gain by trying to empathize with and persuade the out-group.”

That’s a re-run of Trump 2020.

Biden isn’t going to play defense in 2024. The GOP’s core strategy is always to sway working-class voters and use that political base to implement policies that enrich corporations and the wealthy at the expense of their base.

If Biden can find a way to drive a wedge into that Republican coalition, and peel off 3%-5% of their working-class supporters, it would translate into a big victory in 2024.

Monday Wake Up Call – February 6, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sea smoke, South Portland, ME looking towards Portland Head light – February 2023 photo by Benjamin Williamson Photography

On Saturday, Wrongo and Ms. Right went to a dinner party with friends and two generations of family. The after dinner talk turned to how quite a few of the kids and grandkids weren’t planning on having children.

We tossed around ideas about why they were unlikely to procreate, and somethings stood out. First, they see climate change as an existential threat that society is unwilling to solve, even though the technology already exists. Why bring a kid into that?

Second, society seems broken. Our group meant that we face simultaneous crises, layered on top of each other. This situation involving simultaneous global challenges, for which we have few solutions, is called Polycrisis.

And a crisis in one global system can spill over into other global systems. They interact with each another so that each new crisis worsens the overall harm. The Polycrisis environment weakens every individual’s sense of security and their place in the world.

One impact that seems related to the simultaneous climate, health, economic and geopolitical challenges are the effects on children. The needs for special education and special services for the very young has never been greater in America. It’s forcing big changes in public school budgets across the country.

No one is really sure why this is happening.

Wrongo isn’t proposing a solution, just suggesting we need to think more about how the problems of declining birth rates, coupled with the growing issues our young children are facing, might be interrelated.

Noah Smith an economist, has an interesting newsletter about how we define community:

“In the past, our communities were primarily horizontal — they were simply the people we lived close to….Increasingly, though, new technology has enabled us to construct communities that I’ve decided to call vertical — groups of people united by identities, interests, and values rather than by physical proximity.”

Smith says that in the past few decades, Americans became disengaged from their local communities, hunkering down in their houses, and failing to interact with the people around them. That led to a well-documented decline in Americans’ participation in civic organizations, local clubs, etc. Our neighbors can also be stifling and/or repressive because they impose uncomfortable community norms on us.

We’ve always had Smith’s vertical communities: “the Jewish community”, “the LGBT community”, and many others. But in the past, an identity grouping wasn’t a true community. We all have identities that connect us with faraway people — other Irishmen, other Taylor Swift fans.

Prior to the internet, we couldn’t have much contact with them. These loose vertical communities weren’t efficient ways to exchange ideas. Before email, text and streaming video, getting the word out was very slow, and our horizontal communities would decide whether what we wanted to share was worthwhile.

Now, we’re no longer isolated. The internet brought us a world of human interaction: social media feeds, chat apps, and so on. Suddenly we’re surrounded by people through their words, their pictures, and their videos.

Now we organize much of our human interaction around virtual vertical communities. Former occasional connections became Facebook groups, subreddits and personal networks on Twitter. And like our small towns back in the day, vertical communities use social ostracism to punish those who deviate from consensus norms.

But vertical communities can’t provide things like public education, national defense, courts of law, property rights, product standards, and infrastructure that we all depend on.

These require a government to administer them. And governments are organized horizontally; mostly defined by lines on maps. But what if we socialize, cooperate, and fall in love with the people from our vertical community? What if we grow apart from the people next door and the relationship is irreparable?

We see this every day in America when citizens go to a PTA meeting and discover a bunch of strangers saying things that they despise.

Wrongo isn’t saying that vertical communities are another enemy. But they can and do exacerbate the polycrisis by making truth harder to see. And by making effective action more difficult.

If you doubt this, remember how powerful the anti-vaxx vertical was at the height of the Covid pandemic. Today’s vertical communities are strong enough to keep our government from getting much of anything done. How can we work together with neighbors when we share few common bonds?

America today is a predatory society. We predate on politics, ideas, values, and culture. Biden’s trying to change this, but can he succeed? How many of us are trying to help? Changing a society that’s this broken, one that’s moving deeper into vertical communities will be a very heavy lift.

Time to wake up America! What can we do to maintain what Lincoln in his first inaugural address said:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

To help you wake up, listen and watch the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 2022 cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” with Larkin Poe (Rebecca Lovell and Megan Lovell) on vocals and a fabulous slide guitar solo:

Sample of Lyrics:

Standing next to me in this lonely crowd
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame
All day long I hear him shout so loud
Just crying out that he was framed

Saturday Soother – January 28, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Outside Mayfield, Utah – January 2023 photo by Robert Stevens

Wrongo read a review of two books on US agriculture in the New York Review of Books. The books are “Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It” by Tom Philpott, and “The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm” by Sarah Vogel.

The review is written by Ian Frazier. This gives you an idea of his writing:

“We are eating a big hole in the middle of the Midwest and sucking up California’s ancient aquifers until the land collapses like an empty juice box. The awe that new arrivals from other countries feel when they see the bounty in a US supermarket is an illusion—more like what one might experience when stepping from a cold night into a nice, warm house where they’re burning the furniture. In short, we are plundering the natural sources of our food production and can’t go on this way.”

All of this is Big Agriculture’s doing. Corporate farming controls most of our agriculture, but it’s facing the challenge that American consumers can eat only about 1,500 pounds of food per person per year and the US population is only growing at about a half percent/year. But the investors behind Big Ag want more profit than supplying food to a slowly growing US population. So their strategy is to get Americans to eat more, and to find new foreign markets.

Philpott concentrates on just two of the US’s top food-producing regions: California’s Central Valley and the Iowa-centered Corn Belt.

The CA Central Valley constitutes about half of California’s cropland. Smaller farms concentrate on fruits while the large corporate farms mostly concentrate on nuts. Nuts are a highly profitable crop with low labor costs, but they need enormous amounts of water: To grow a single almond requires about a gallon of water.

Frazier says that almond groves cover about a fifth of the San Joaquin Valley and consume four times as much water as the city of Los Angeles:

“…I eat plenty of nuts myself, including almonds. Looking in the pantry, I see I possess the almond-growing equivalent of a few dozen bathtubfuls of California water.”

Philpott points out that TIAA, a leading provider of financial services owns a 40% stake in Treehouse California Almonds. The Farmland Index, which tracks the performance of agricultural investments, has outperformed the Standard & Poor’s index 11.8% to 9.6% in recent decades.

One problem with California’s Ag dominance is that it takes an increasing share of an increasingly scarce water supply. When irrigation water from snow and rain is scarce, as it has been for decades, farmers pump more of California’s groundwater. Nobody can say when the groundwater will run out because nobody knows how much CA has.

Turning to the Midwest, Frazier points out that the Corn Belt is one and a half times the size of California’s farming acreage. The Corn Belt uses so much fertilizer that it delivers a huge amount of polluted agricultural runoff via the Mississippi down to the Gulf of Mexico. Off of Louisiana, there’s a marine dead zone the size of New Jersey.

Huge companies dominate Midwest farming, from fertilizer and seed manufacturers to large and expensive farm machinery equipment. There is concentration in the companies that buy, process and ship the grain: Three companies: Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), and Ingredion control 87% of the US corn market. Four companies: ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Ag Processing handle 85% of the soybeans.

It is cheaper to raise pork in the US than it is in China because our feed is cheaper. Smithfield is the world’s largest pork producer and is Chinese-owned. AND, the 23 million hogs in Iowa along with Iowa’s other livestock produce as much excrement every year as do 168 million humans.

This data are called “fecal equivalent”. Iowa produces the same amount as the world’s eleven largest cities. Shouldn’t that be on Iowa’s license plate?

But the headline is that mid-sized and small farms are dying. Frazier says that midsize farms are too small to compete with the corporate farms in volume and price. OTOH, they are too big to be supported by the farmers’ outside income. In her book, Sara Vogel says the midsize farm is in danger of going extinct:

“In today’s economy [they] wouldn’t have a prayer.”

Frazier closes by wondering who in agriculture will work to save our environment. He concludes that Big Ag won’t try. A disturbing, but important article.

Time to take a break from politics and economics. It’s also time to ignore that inflation is down and an asteroid narrowly missed the earth. Instead, let’s relax with our Saturday Soother. Readers who are into football will spend their Sunday watching the NFL’s division championship games. That will probably include Wrongo. To kick off our weekend, listen to Alexandra Whittingham and Stephanie Jones perform “Helping Hands” by Sergio Assad. Assad is a Brazilian guitarist. We have featured Whittingham here before, but Jones is new to us:

China’s Population Declines

The Daily Escape:

Dune Evening Primrose, Anza-Borrego Desert SP, CA – January 2023 photo by Paulette Donnellon

From the NYT:

“The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, years long decline in its birthrate that experts say is irreversible.”

Irreversible. It was the first time that deaths had outnumbered births in China since Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

Feng Wang, Professor of Sociology, UC Irvine agrees: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“As a scholar of Chinese demographics, I know that the figures released by Chinese government on Jan. 17, 2023…. is the onset of what is likely to be a long-term decline. By the end of the century, the Chinese population is expected to shrink by 45%, according to the United Nations. And that is under the assumption that China maintains its current fertility rate of around 1.3 children per couple, which it may not.”

China has tried different policies for years in an effort to delay this moment, first, by loosening a one-child policy and then, by offering financial incentives to encourage families to have more children. Neither policy worked. Now, facing a population decline, coupled with a continuing rise in life expectancy, China’s demographics will have consequences not just for China but possibly for the rest of us.

China’s rise as an economic powerhouse is the result of its becoming the world’s factory floor. That created the world’s largest middle class. It moved hundreds of millions of rural Chinese to urban areas and fueled the spectacular growth of its largest cities. It made China the world’s second-largest economy, and also led to the increase in life expectancy.

Both Feng Wang and the NYT worry that China’s declining population will lead to a time when China will not have enough people of working age to fuel its growth. In the short run, there will be fewer workers to generate future growth in their economy. In the longer run, the costs to maintain an aging, post-work population will become very high (like in the US).

But economies don’t stand still for long. That China has a manufacturing-oriented economy isn’t a negative but a positive in this scenario. China has been moving up the manufacturing value chain for more than 20 years. So they are in a good position to use automation to address increasing labor scarcity and (presumed) rising labor costs.

They could also encourage work after normal retirement age, even if part time, with better wages and job environments. And like other countries facing similar issues, they could encourage immigration.

The US may be closer to China’s fate than we think. The US Census says that: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The U.S. population grew at a slower rate in 2021 than in any other year since the founding of the nation….[growing by] only 0.1%…”

It looks like we’re on a similar trajectory to China as are many other developed nations. Japan is currently dealing with it. South Korea and Taiwan are currently at a crossroads as both are facing a massive demographic crash. But, both are smaller and more economically developed than China, so they also have options. Much of Europe is looking at the same problem.

The solution would seem to be to allow immigration from the less developed world. But that comes with the likelihood that the newcomers will change our social and cultural norms. With immigration, our norms will change, and control of the politics in each country is likely to evolve as well.

The alternative to permanent economic growth is to allow the population shrinkage to happen. It’s kind of infuriating that big business and their captured politicians fail to recognize that a shrinking population (within reason) is both essential for our future and a good thing in the long run.

It can be scary: But transitioning from an economic model based on a constant input of young, working people to one where, we create fewer jobs, can work. If we make sure that those jobs are extremely productive.

What is the end game of an ever expanding population and perpetual economic growth for the human race? The world population when Wrongo was born was about 2.3 billion. It’s 3.5 times that today. Since resources are finite, it’s an inescapable conclusion that someday we must shrink the number of people. So why not today?

Sure, we can extend the economic life of certain resources by using new technologies. But if we continue to expand the number of humans on earth, we’ll see a global war for those resources, which will be a catastrophe.

Is a commitment to low population/low economic growth even possible at this late stage of capitalism?

It’s Always About Turnout

The Daily Escape:

Verbena in bloom, Anza-Borrego Desert, CA – November 2022 photo by Frank Sengpiel

The midterms are over and some interesting analysis is now available. Kyle Kondik at Sabato’s Crystal Ball has an analysis of how Republicans took the majority in the House by winning more districts that Biden carried than Democrats won districts carried by Trump. From Kondik:

“There are currently slated to be 18 Republicans in Biden seats and just 5 Democrats in Trump seats.”

Kondik reports that the overall number of “crossover” districts — seats that vote for one party for House but the other party for president — has been generally on a downward trajectory. Back in 2008, Democrats held nearly 50 districts that Republican presidential nominee John McCain carried. But many of those districts went red in 2010 and, aside from 2018, Democrats have won relatively few districts won by the other side’s presidential candidate.

And Republicans have now won more of these seats in 6 of the last 7 elections, as the overall number of crossover districts has generally declined. Kondik says:

“Overall, Republicans won 5 double-digit Biden districts…while Democrats won just 1 double-digit Trump district. If those districts had voted in line with their presidential partisanship, the Republican House edge would be just 218-217.”

Immediately post-election, many Dems focused on New York where six House seats flipped to the GOP in districts that Biden had won in 2020. Democrats may think that a weak campaign by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) hurt them. But the Albany Times Union recently reported that Republican turnout in New York far outpaced Democratic turnout, with GOP turnout reaching 2020 presidential levels on Long Island:

“Republican turnout was substantially higher than for Democrats, 63 to 47 percent, according to an analysis of unofficial election results obtained by the Times Union from the state Board of Elections.”

This was a problem for Democrats all across the US. Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, an industry leader in using political data, tweeted about another way to look at the poor turnout by Democrats:

The possibly flippable districts Bonier is talking about are: IA3, NY17, MI10, CA13, CO3. Add to those the other five NY districts won by Biden that flipped, and you could have had a decent Democratic majority in the House.

But instead, we’ll be listening to the presumed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy say things like he did on Wednesday. He sent a letter to the January 6th Committee demanding that it preserve “all documents and transcripts” gathered by the Committee.

You should know that his demand is pointless. The Committee had already announced it will publish all documents and transcripts to ensure that Republicans do not destroy evidence when they take over the Committee.

As you may have already concluded about this election cycle, Pew Research says that in-person voting increased compared with 2020. A clear majority of Americans who voted in this year’s Congressional elections say they cast their ballots in person. Nearly two-thirds of voters (65%) submitted ballots in person, including 44% who say they voted on Election Day and 21% who voted in person before Election Day.

In the 2020 presidential election that took place during the Coronavirus, a smaller majority (54%) submitted ballots in person, including just 27% who cast ballots on Election Day.

Absentee and mail-in voting declined from 46% of voters in 2020 to 35% this year. Republicans (52%) are more likely to say they voted in person on Election Day than Democrats (35%), but the share of Democrats voting on Election Day 2022 doubled compared with 2020 (17%).

There were large differences in how voters cast ballots by age and racial or ethnic groups. Nearly two-thirds of voters ages 65 and older say they either voted in person before Election Day or voted by mail or absentee.

That compares with narrower majorities of voters in younger age groups, who were more likely to vote in person on Election Day. In addition, White voters were more likely to report voting in person on Election Day (46%) than Black (40%), Hispanic (32%) or Asian voters (21%).

Overall, the big takeaway for Democrats, both for the Warnock vote on December 6 and for the 2024 Presidential and Congressional elections, is that TURNOUT wins close elections.

And we must expect that all future Congressional and Presidential elections will be decided by razor-thin numbers in many places.

Give your money to groups that are committed to growing turnout.

Is “Yellowstone” A Political Show?

The Daily Escape:

Early snow, Zion NP, UT, November 2022 photo by Bob Busund

After friends and many family members said that they really liked the TV show “Yellowstone”, Wrongo and Ms. Right watched the 2-hour season premiere on Paramount on Sunday night to see if we should commit to watching all five seasons.

Wrongo’s hot take is that the show is “The Sopranos” with horses. There’s some family intrigue like on “Succession” but the Logan Roy family isn’t directly responsible for killing people or animals at the volume of Montana’s John Dutton family.

Since its launch in 2018, Yellowstone has become one of TV’s most-watched dramas. January’s fourth-season finale had over 9 million viewers the night it aired. By comparison, HBO’s Succession drew 1.7 million for its third-season finale a few weeks earlier.

From the NYT:

“John Dutton, a Marlboro Man Tony Soprano, runs the Yellowstone Ranch like a quasi-mob. His wranglers, many of them ex-cons, are branded with a “Y” to mark them as his. When they’re not breaking horses, they’re breaking his enemies’ faces (and often one another’s).”

We watched the season-five opener where patriarch John Dutton becomes governor of Montana, basically running on a platform of “Why do I have to do everything myself”? He owns the largest ranch in Montana but feels that the whole world is conspiring against him. Specifically, it’s a cabal of greedy tycoons who want to buy Dutton’s property and build casinos, condos, and ski chalets on it.

So the main fight is between rich, white-collar city folk who have degrees and suits. The Dutton’s hate those people who fly in from California and then get their (relatively) small farms qualified for tax breaks. The Dutton’s enemies are the bankers and lawyers who are part of the scheming to take Dutton land.

It seems that John Dutton is defending his land and way of life from educated, monied outsiders who rarely actually go outside. Since his enemies mostly live on the coasts, the show is a kind of Red vs. Blue allegory.

Yellowstone’s message is that if you live in rural America, other Americans envy you. You have something they want. Even if you are land poor, you’re richer than they are. And they’ll try and take it from you if you let them.

There’s a market reality to that thinking. Nationwide, available farmland is scarce. Last year, values increased by 12.4% to an average price of $3,800 an acre. Elsewhere, the NYT reports that: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“… the supply of land is limited. About 40% of farmland in the United States is rented, most of it owned by landlords who are not actively involved in farming. And the amount of land available for purchase is extremely scant, with less than 1% of farmland sold on the open market annually.”

Both small and beginning farmers are being priced out of farmland. And Bill Gates is the largest owner of farmland in America. Like wealth, land ownership has become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. And thus, land costs more, resulting in a greater push for more intensive industrial farming techniques to generate higher returns.

One report found that just 1% of the world’s largest farms control 70% of the world’s farmland. And the biggest shift in recent years from small to big farms was in the US. No wonder then, that Yellowstone has a big and loyal audience in America’s heartland. Land is power, land is wealth, and importantly, land remains a way to sort both race and class in America.

Yellowstone is described as a “red-state show”. Based on watching just two hours, Wrongo can see that, but as the NYT says:

“On one level, the appeal of “Yellowstone” is apolitical and as old as TV. It’s a big, trashy, addictive soap about a family business, like “Dallas”

It speaks the language of today’s culture wars with a country accent. We found the family members in Yellowstone both hard to like, or root for, but the show gives them enemies who seem worse. So you can maybe accept the amorality of it.

Wrongo doesn’t see it as a Conservative show in a political sense. The issues Yellowstone raises about land stewardship and big business are relevant, and not just in rural America. But from Wrongo’s limited experience with the show, the plot is more about romance, violence and feuds, along with beautiful horses and Montana scenery.

Dutton’s trying to conserve his family’s land. If you think about it, that’s not something today’s conservatives are at all interested in doing. Developers on the coasts are happy to pave over everything, and very, very few of them are liberals and/or Democrats.

And you don’t have to be politically conservative to want to preserve our natural world.

Will we watch more? Depends on what else is on.

Monday Wake Up Call – September 19, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Willard Beach, South Portland, ME – September 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo

Last week, Wrongo wrote about how if you know a little about politics, your issues are guns, abortion, and taxes. We need to think about adding immigration to that list. Blog reader Craig G. asked, “when is enough, enough?” in response to Wrongo’s column on DeSantis sending immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard.

It’s a great question. We tend to think of immigration as an American/Mexican border problem, but it is much, much worse than that. The UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees reported in May 2022, that the world, for the first time in history, had 100 million forcibly displaced people either in camps or on the move.

Of those who were on the move, “conflict and violence” accounted for 14.4 million, and “weather-related events” accounted for 23.7 million. The distinction between these numbers is often hard to understand. The civil war in Syria for example, produced large numbers of refugees. In 2021, more than 6.8 million refugees were from Syria, more than any other country in the world. At the same time, another 6.9 million people were displaced within Syria. The Syrian civil war followed the most profound drought ever recorded in what used to be the Fertile Crescent.

About 100 million migrants is huge, more than the population of Germany, Turkey or, Vietnam. But it could get worse as the impacts of climate change broaden throughout the 3rd world. The International Organization for Migration has predicted that we could see 1.5 billion people forced from their homes by 2050.

These numbers are staggering. Now couple them with America’s declining birth rate. Econofact reports that the US birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. They say the decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. So, what if it continues while the number of people knocking on America’s doors continues to grow?

As Craig G. implies, there could come a time when all Americans will agree to limit immigration. Otherwise, a smaller, aging America will be asking what some on the Right are asking today: Who are the “real” Americans? What do we owe recent immigrants?

The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1 says:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

How will we adjust when the majority of our population are from different cultures, different races and speak different languages? The children of first-generation immigrants generally are well-adapted to the broad American culture; for the most part, they sound and act like Americans. If they were born here they ARE Americans. But the first generation migrant has an understandably difficult time.

This has caused the Right and specifically, the Christian nationalists on the right to be stingy about who they say is a true American, despite when many kids of immigrants are born here in America.The 14th Amendment doesn’t require any ideological, racial or language prerequisite.

Our low birth rates mean we can’t replace our population, so our economic growth will slow. If we replace our population with immigrants, we’ll have economic growth, but our culture will inexorably change.

Our history gives us some pointers. Immigration to the US peaked in the 19th century in the decade 1880-89 when it reached 5,248,568. The first decade of the 20th century saw another record with 8,202,388 people entering the country. In 1910, 75% of the population of New York, Chicago, Detroit and Boston consisted of first and second generation immigrants.

Remember that the US population was 62,979,766 in 1890, an increase of 25.5% percent since the prior census in 1880. Contrast that with today. Stastia says that 710,000 legal immigrants arrived here in 2021, and that we had 11.39 million illegal immigrants living in the US at year end 2018. We’re five times larger today.

Think about it: In 1890, our foreign-born population was 9.2 million. The total US population was 62.9 million. 5.2/62.9 = 14.6% of our population were immigrants. In 2018, out foreign-born population is 44.8 million. 44.8/320 million in US = 14.0%. Is our problem worse today?

Time to wake up America! A tsunami of immigrants will try to move from the 3rd world to the developed world. The numbers will be staggering, beyond anything experienced so far by Europe or the US. Our ability to cope with so many people in motion in some even modestly humane fashion will determine the character of our country over the next century.

To help you wake up, listen to John Moreland perform “Ugly Faces” from his 2022 album “Birds in the Ceiling”.

Sample Lyric:

You’re seeing ugly faces in your dreams
Let me know what it means
We told ourselves we’d tell it true
But I learned how to lie, watching you
This dirty place don’t want you here
Looks like you’re stuck another year
You close your eyes, a scene rolls by
A strip mall under sunburst sky
My back was to a corner, lonely in a crowd
I couldn’t hear you calling, the bullshit was so loud

Saturday Soother – August 20, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Stormy view from House Mountain, Sedona, AZ – August 2022 photo by Ed Mitchell

Tens of thousands of teacher openings are unfilled as students head back to American classrooms. That’s prompting states and school districts to try everything they can to address the teacher shortage.

Except increase their pay. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has tracked teacher compensation for 18 years. Here’s the headline:

“…teachers are paid less (in weekly wages and total compensation) than their nonteacher college-educated counterparts, and the situation has worsened considerably over time.”

EPI tracks what they call the relative teacher wage penalty, the relative wages and total compensation of teachers compared to other college graduates. Here are the EPI’s findings:

Inflation-adjusted average weekly wages of teachers have been relatively flat since 1996. The average weekly wages of public school teachers (adjusted for inflation) increased just $29 from 1996 to 2021, while inflation-adjusted weekly wages of other college graduates rose from $1,564 to $2,009 —a $445 increase.

The relative teacher wage penalty reached a record high in 2021. It was 23.5% in 2021, up from 6.1% in 1996. The penalty was worse for men than for women. The penalty for men rose from 18.6% to 35.2%.
The great portfolio of teachers’ benefits used to be a selling point, but it hasn’t been enough to offset the growing wage penalty. The teacher total compensation penalty was 14.2% in 2021 (a 23.5% wage penalty offset by a 9.3% benefits advantage).
The relative teacher wage penalty exceeds 20% in 28 states. Teacher weekly wage penalties estimated for each state range from 3.4% in Rhode Island to 35.9% in Colorado. In 28 states, teachers are paid less than 80 cents on the dollar earned by similar college-educated workers.

The EPI has a chart showing the relative erosion of teacher wages vs. other college graduates since 1980:

The EPI focuses on “weekly wages” to avoid the comparisons of length of the work year (i.e., the “summers off” issue for teachers).

Add to this the general decline in working conditions for teachers, and many who are eligible for retirement are leaving. Republicans in particular are politicizing education. Some are pushing the idea of “parental rights.” That is happening in Florida, Texas and in other states. It’s clear that in some school districts parents want the right to censor what’s being taught. Some Conservatives are pushing for a camera in every classroom across America. Tucker Carlson called for cameras in classrooms to “oversee the people teaching your children, forming their minds.”

This comes under the guise of “transparency in the classroom”, parents keeping an eye on teachers, so they won’t teach the dreaded Critical Race Theory (or groom kids to become trans, or gay). Teachers naturally bristle at the idea of video auditing.

Forcing teacher compliance with imposed politicized curricula won’t make these jobs any more desirable.

Some states are relaxing licensing requirements to make it easier for people to fill some of those unfilled jobs. Florida, which has about 8,000 open teaching positions, is allowing military veterans without a bachelor’s degree and no prior teaching experience to apply for a temporary five-year teaching certificate while they finish their bachelor’s degrees.

The biggest issues to solve are better public school funding, which can help end the teacher wage penalty. That requires towns to raise taxes. Second, the politicization of education is changing the amount of parental control in the day-to-day operations in some school districts. That’s making teaching an even lower-status job than it is now.

According to the BLS, there are currently 300,000 fewer teachers nationwide compared to before the pandemic. Part of this is job satisfaction. A survey from the American Federation of Teachers found that 74% of teachers were dissatisfied with their job, up from 41% two years ago.

If teachers and staff are underpaid, under-resourced and are now being second-guessed in the classroom, they’re not going to stay. So replacing them will become an even bigger problem.

Enough of this week’s problems, it’s time for our Saturday Soother! Let’s put Trump’s secrets and Liz Cheney’s political prospects on pause. We’re facing moderate drought conditions here in CT, so lawn mowing has ceased, and our grass is brown and crunchy.

But, it’s time to empty our minds, so that we can begin filling them up again on Monday. Start by grabbing a cold glass of lemonade and a seat in the shade.

Now, watch and listen to Antonin Dvorak’s “4 miniatures”, for 2 Violins and Viola, played here by the Musicians of Lenox Hill at Temple Israel of the City of New York in April 2019:

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

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